Research on Distribution Centers Location Problem under E-Commerce Environment Based on Max-Min Ant System

The distribution center (DC) plays an important role as a bridge in maintaining the uninterrupted flow of goods between the suppliers and customers, and its location problem is attached importance very much. As electronic commerce is developing rapidly, it brings new distribution demand for logistics; in particular customers require more satisfying service of time. In this paper, the existing distribution center location model is expanded by adding time cost and considering the situation with multi-suppliers and multi-customers, so we construct the DCs location model under e-commerce. Meanwhile, this problem is divided into the supply stage and the distribution stage, and then we use the max-min ant clustering algorithm at these stages respectively to optimize the complete location problem. A numerical example is given to validate the feasibility of this algorithm, and the results indicate that this algorithm is suitable for the DC location with the existence of multi-suppliers and multi-customers.